If I told you that I took this picture in an English-speaking country, you’d probably believe me. The sign is in English, after all. There’s a KFC sticker on the bottom of it and everything. Would anything make you think otherwise?

The picture was taken in Shibuya, and the billboard is plastered across one of the district’s most popular malls, 109 (“ichi maru kyuu”). This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Native Japanese producers often use English in marketing to native Japanese consumers by using a language common to neither party, often to comedic effect:

In fact, there is an entire website dedicated to documenting such grammatical blunders.

Often, English words (in the Roman alphabet) are integrated into otherwise-standard Japanese:

(Also, note the web-enabled barcode for phones in the picture above that I mentioned in the last post.)

As far as I know, Japan is the only country in which products are successfully marketed in the audience’s non-native language. If anyone knows of another such country, let me know. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and I’d like to figure out what forces might lead to it.

Next post will focus on the presence of loanwords in Japanese. Look forward to it.